Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Four Humans. One Spider.

A spider under a plastic cup and four humans standing antsy around the cup discussing how the arachnid should be disposed of.

I walked into the house late the other night, set my keys and wallet down, took my jacket off, and heard my sister, Krissy, eagerly call me from down the hall to "come here." I walked toward the bedroom.

"There is a huge spider in here! I swear it is a tarantula; Nicole thinks it is a brown recluse. I don't know, but it is so big!"

My sister had enough guts to trap the spider under a cup, and that's where the spider's life was temporarily halted. There ended up being four of us in the bedroom looking stupidly at the spider through the translucent cup, trying to infer what type of spider it actually was. We then started looking at each other with half-smiles and big eyes to see who would cave in and actually eradicate spidy, and how. Krissy kept us in trepidation by giving testimonies about the spider's agility and swiftness and how it was "so fast." Whoever lifted the cup just had to know this pertinent information in order to be as pscyhed-out as possible before doing the deed. The longer we stared at the cup, the more the spider grew in power. Future events began to play out in all of our heads: "What if this, or what if that happened."

Our imaginations took over. Spidy was winning by simply being. Four humans standing around a cup, hundreds and hundreds of times larger and heavier than the spider, vastly more intelligent, and yet we still feared its ability to escape and possibly continue living. We doubted our wits. We thought a spider would outwit us and win.

I ran to the garage to look for something to smash spidy, and while I was frantically scanning and shifting boxes around, I got a hold of myself and told myself: "Are you serious? A spider? You need something bigger than a standard shoe to kill something an inch and a half long?"

I then grabbed my top-sider and, while I still had my momentary confidence, marched back to the bedroom, lifted the cup and swung hard.